katakat.com bytes from a participant observer

I just got an email from one of my favorite online stores, ThinkGeek.com. Check this out: Wi-Fi tee shirt.

Ok, the fires are mostly over, at least where I am. Lots of devastation around the county. Too depressing to think about, so let's move onto something trifling...PC vs Mac! Despite being bi-platform myself, having a PC at work and a Mac at home, I'm somewhat partial to the Mac. It's just so much more fun, and no Blue Screen of Death. I also loved Apple's ad campaign with the guys impersonating the machines. Hysterical.

Check out this site: http://www.fire.ca.gov/ Last count is 20 fires in Southern California. TV has regular shows on, so I guess the hubub died down a bit for now. I should go to sleep, since it is 1:20 a.m. Note to self: do not drink caffeinated tea in the evenings. Ever.

This is what you're NOT supposed to do during wildfires. Especially in a borrowed minivan. Some guys just like life on the edge, I suppose.

These were taken around 6:00 this morning, from the Harris fire, to the southeast of SD. My friend submitted these to the Channel 10 website: http://www.10news.com/slideshow/weather/14406064/detail.html

GoogleMap link to fires. The fires started here in San Diego on Sunday afternoon. When I left the folks' place after Sunday lunch (around 5 p.m.) I could see a layer of brown smoke in the air to the north of their place. Monday morning, the smell of smoke was a lot stronger. By 11:00, many schools had closed and ours was the only campus in our district still open. So we all waited and watched our email to finally get the signal to go home.

Mailing a letter via USPS is something I usually avoid, so I have accumulated quite a few outdated stamps along the way. As I sat here looking through them so as to add up enough for current postage ($0.41 today) I came across a bunch of H rate makeup stamps with no value written on them. Upon doing a Google search, I found they are worth about one cent each. So I'll probably use them all at once just for the hell of it. (You might be the lucky recipient!) Meanwhile, one of the web sites I surfed by pointed me to this fantastic philately site.

So I did finally buy a computer a few weeks back. Actually went to the Apple Store and walked out with it. Plus a few extras, of course. I wanted to get everything set up before my classes started up again on October 8th. "Everything" being the Windows side of the house, so I bought and installed Vista, which insists on crashing. I figured it had been out for a year, so why not go for it? I have my answer. Yes, I still do have Windows software that won't run on my Mac, if that's your question.

I went mountain biking on an actual trail last weekend: Penasquitos Canyon. It was fun, as long as I didn't dwell too much on the fact that I was riding very fast over large rocks, or on a narrow path with a uphill slope on one side and a downhill slope on the other (with lots of painful-looking things to land on). Momentum is your friend, especially through sand. Beautiful day, too. We did about 14 miles. Path included a waterfall. It's amazing that I had driven past the park many times and never knew it was there. More discovery to do in this town!

It's been 16 years since I bought a bicycle. My, how the technology has changed. My old bike (which I always thought of as the "new bike" when I also had my 10-speed) is a lightweight touring bike built for the petite woman, with a smaller front wheel. Basically, a pain to change tires. Normally I research the hell out of major purchases, but this time I just walked into a store and had the salesperson sell me something like what I think I wanted. So I left with an extra-small mountain bike that looks like a monster compared to my touring bike.

Here's what floats around in my head when I'm not trying to figure out my statistics homework. It's debatable as to which is most important at this time: 1) Finding a care facility for my mom that won't cost $80K/year 2) Moving on after a relationship ends. 3) I'm almost out of toilet paper.